Workshop Synthesis and Next Steps

Thinking about what you learned about MATLAB

 

What felt difficult or is something you're still working on understanding?

• What I want my students to report back. Is it questions, is it a specific code. 
• Knowing some parts of MATLAB really well, I wonder how often and just how to update my understanding of what is new and how to follow new releases. 
• More control of embedded figures
• What is developmentally appropriate expectations for my students interacting with MATLAB. For Example how many AI coding iterations to expect them to do. 
• How to get excited about learning coding skills and how to make the RTO transparent to them to get them engaged
• Live script is a tool that might lead to student excitement and engagement 
• Hearing what people are doing with MATLAB in different departments, I start to understand what is happening in other courses my students (Math) might be using what I'm teaching them. Can expand this cross department understanding. 
• How disseminate the live script 'iceberg' - I only knew part of what was available and now I see that there is a bigger world that I need to explore to understand 
• How much scaffolding to give students at different stages in the class (maybe in their career?). Use their own code, give them code, have them see code in action etc. what is practical. 
• Using Error messages as learning tools - how to do this well in the classroom. It could be a valuable tool. They are terrified and also want to feel accomplished - it's OK to use errors as learning opportunities. Lowers the barrier to starting. 
• For me, I got some nice ideas about real life problems I can use as examples in my class, like the way I can 
• Now I know where to find useful things and there are lots of things to absorb - now I know where to find things. One on one session was an effective strategy for learning together. I just got a bunch of new scripts that I will be working on using. More for me to explore now that I know all the places to look. 
• Have an example for the use of SVD in movie recommendation, and also a nice way to use the centroid and the center of mass and explain their uses, and much more :) 

You are working to increase the use of computation at your institution.

 

What would be the one thing that could be done to make that happen and who should do it

• We are trying to have complementary people who work together (TAs, younger staff etc.) support the more senior faculty. New people bringing in new ideas and engaging with students more directly and due to being early career bringing energy and more of a near-peer value to the delivery of content. Need to work across departments so faculty who are 'sharing' students need to work together to make sure the 'new ways' of doing this are reinforced across courses. 
• Nice to be dazzled by final products of MATLAB teaching efforts and coding. Here there is some seeing what is under the hood to make the final products and the work it takes to get there. Maybe I can get course release to make new, dazzling, teaching products - knowing it takes. a lot of effort. Chairs and administration have responsibility to support these new material development efforts. 
• Looking forward to more materials for K-12 students and excited that MathWorks is attending to the lower grades.  In the time of AI - we're moving away from only teaching with pencil and paper. This is on teachers to think about how to bring technology and curiosity about technology into traditional teaching. 
• Faculty and instructors need to use technology right in front of the class and model how to do things in real time - including the messy process. Could reinforce a sense of trial and error in a grading rubric. Or reinforce the importance of handwritten notes by making that part of what is graded. 
• (side note that there is a trade off in moving to technology that might come with students losing basic skills)
• Making a change may take a while so we can work on this one class at a time. Contingent faculty might work with multiple TT faculty over time and have the capacity to build smaller, modular materials that could be implemented into an existing class. Someone who has computational skills might partner with someone who has domain or topical content skills to ease them into using computation bit by bit. 
• Lisa's note - that there are people who have jobs creating specific deliverables related to helping people teach computation - making a thing for an instructor 
• Would like to have a Wiki for specific topical groups (fluids engineering etc.) so people can crowdsource content/Live Scripts and Grader activities so everyone can  use a commonly created set of curricular material across institutions
• Broad awareness of what is available in terms of both tools and materials will naturally lead to more uptake of teaching with computation. We would like to have more workshops at multiple scales to spread effect of this workshop and ones like it. - maybe we can run things like this locally to spread what we've learned
• Microcredentialing could be an answer - university supports creating micro credential programs so maybe learning to teach computation could be a topic. 
• Hard to have conversations with departments and with other departments about what their students need that your department can teach - get everyone on the same page and moving toward the same goals for students. Hard to facilitate these conversations. 
• Prereqs can be an issue for computation courses. Maybe touching base with feeder classes to make sure faculty and students know what is coming and what to be ready for is a strategy to get students 
• Organise an open day of all Matlab projects/teaching techniques at University level to share best practices among each other. 
• Integrate Matlab Grader with LMS by University LMS Admin.
• Use more AI Chat Playground and Matlab ChatGPT by all the students and faculty. 
• I will put more of my courses on MATLAB Grader and ask our math department head, as well as our ECE department head to facilitate integration of MATLAB in other courses.